


Waves and the Both of Us

by worstcommander



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, post-destroy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 04:31:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worstcommander/pseuds/worstcommander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaidan, Shepard and the last bathtub on Earth. Gift fic for rosenkovmaterials.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waves and the Both of Us

"How did you talk me into this again?" Bennet pauses at the foot of the porch stairs and breathes through the twinge in her hip. With anyone else she'd pass it off as something else, pretend to be fascinated with the weathered grain of the wooden railing, but it's just Kaidan here. There's no need.

"I believe I said the magic words," he says, leaving the luggage on the porch and jogging back down the stairs. He closes in behind her, fitting his chin over her shoulder and lacing his hands across her stomach. "' _Running water._ '"

Oh, _that_. As many times as she's counted her blessings in the past year, tried to put things in perspective - she's alive, Kaidan’s alive, and there were a lot of survivors left on Earth that would consider themselves lucky to only walk with a bit of a limp - a traitorous sliver of her mind points out that even at the height of the Reaper War, she could take a hot shower and flush her toilet whenever she wanted. Kaidan had needed to wheedle her away from her duties with the Alliance reconstruction for a week, but if she were being honest with herself, it hadn't taken much convincing once he'd mentioned he'd gotten his mother's water pump working.

"Enough time wasting," Kaidan says, patting her on the ass before moving inside the farmhouse, duffel bags slung over his shoulders. "I've got a surprise for you."

The stairs are a minor challenge, one foot followed by the other with a break at the top to breathe. It wasn't normally such a trial, hadn't been for a few months now, but the skycar ride had been long and the passenger bench unforgiving.

"Is it a nice soft bed?"

Kaidan meets her at the door and takes her coat, brushing a kiss across her cheek.

"Better."

"A nice soft bed and a handsome young man to feed me grapes?"

"Ah... better, sweetheart." He's disappeared down the hall, but his warm chuckle drifts back to her. "In here."

It's a bathroom, clean white tile and natural light filtering through a glazed window on one wall. That's as far as her mind catalogs before hands cover her eyes, blocking the view.

"Remember what you told me? About the first thing you'd do once the war was over?" Kaidan's voice is low in her ear, breath ticking along the shell of her ear. "You said you'd take-"

_"-a bath," Bennet sighs. "A big tub full of hot water, and I'll sit in it until the water gets cold, even after my fingers prune." She shifts in the cradle of his arms, her cheek pressed against his chest. "Will you still love me when my fingers are all wrinkly?" Kaidan pretends to deliberate._

_"Mmm, nope. Do you think turians get pruny? Maybe I should go see how Garrus is doing..." He moves to leave the bed and she drags him back, laugh melting into a sigh as his lips find her ear and his hand slides down to her -_

He draws back the curtain with the flourish.

A bathtub. A big one, heavy and old. She's seen pictures, but never one like this in real life. Kaidan's started the water running and she stops her study of the tub to start her study of him as he strips his shirt off over his head, drops his pants to pool around his ankles. He's leaner than he was last year, rations are still tight in the cities and he's not pulling daily combat drops in heavy armor anymore. A scar crawls over his stomach to curl around the notch of his hip - that one is hers, the aftermath of their frenzied run at the beam in London.

He'd aggravated it, Chakwas had said. Dragged himself to the CIC after a numbing injection and the most basic of medigel patchings, walked around with it bandaged for too many days after the Normandy's emergency landing. It would never heal quite right, the muscles always a little weaker around it, the skin a little too tight. He catches her staring.

"Hey, hey. Ben. None of that," Kaidan cradles her cheek in one hand, rubs a rough thumb along the line of her cheekbone. "We've talked about this. Just some scratches. Besides," he murmurs, slipping a hand under the hem of her shirt to stroke her skin, "now we match."

Bennet smiles despite herself and allows him to peel the shirt off, stretching stiff ribs as the worn fabric clears her head. "Match" is being kind. When she was rescued from the ruins of the Citadel Tower, the medics had been concerned with keeping her breathing. The next few weeks had passed in a barely-conscious haze, punctuated by the surgeries that saved her limbs and shored up her failing organs. Her skin was hatched with healing scars, rough with burns and the rare patch of grafted tissue.

There is one scar, though, cutting across her hipbone, twin to his. His hand lingers over it as he finishes undressing her, steering her towards the steaming tub.

“Your bath, madame.” He helps her into the tub, keeping weight off of her bad hip as she lowers herself into the water. It’s the perfect temperature, almost too hot, and she hisses as she sinks into it by inches, the gradual fire. He waits until she’s settled, every limb arranged in weightless symmetry.

“Ok, make room. Scoot.” She moves forward obligingly, and he slides in behind her, molds his chest to her back.

There’s something about the way they fit. Always has been. Not just the way their bodies snap together, keys in locks and tabs in slots. Two weeks into their tour on the Normandy they’d been finishing each other’s sentences. Months later, each other’s breaths. There’s never been another person who lived so completely in the peaks and valleys of her brainwaves.

“You had a good plan, Shepard,” he drawls. “Knew I followed you for a reason.”

“Mmm.”

For a long time, they don’t speak. They don’t really need to, but it’s nice to appreciate it on its own merits sometimes. Her fingers drag through the water, tiny swimmers making nonsense figures. Little waves breaking against the jutting peaks of his knees.

“The water’s getting cold,” she says.

“Hmm.” Kaidan’s fingers are making figures of their own, tracing down her collarbones.

“We should really think about getting out.”

“Hmmm.” Collarbone’s connected to the rib bone, rib bone heads down to the-

“Ah.” She arches into his hand, his rough fingers tracing a nipple. Not hard like she wants, hard enough to matter.

That’s something that isn’t in his personnel files. Major Kaidan Alenko is a damn _tease_.

There’s those waves again. He’s a tease but she’s patient. She can wait him out.

They rise and they fall. His hand moves to the soft curve under her breast and suddenly her head is too heavy. She rests it on his shoulder, cropped hair sweatslick against her forehead.

“Getting warmer...”

“Oh, you want something?” He chuckles softly against her ear. Drags one hand down her ribs, past the scar on her hip. The water finishes what his hand starts, phantom currents whispering through the curls between her legs. Craning her neck, she kisses him, tongue sliding over the scars on his lips.

“Please, Kaidan.”

“Oh?”

“ _Please_.”

She parts her thighs and his hand snakes between them, carding lightly through the soft hair he finds there. It drags in the waves of them, the tides she generates as her hips sway gently against him. A clever finger circles her, drags up the border of one lip and down the other, seconds from the place she wants him.

There’s a difference between silence and the absence of words. They don’t speak but they’re not silent, as her gasps overlay the soft lapping of the water against the sides of the bathtub. His questing finger brushes her hood and her hips jerk unconsciously towards it with an answering splash of the bathwater. He laughs in her ear, a low drag of a sound as his lips brush her.

The finger is replaced with the heel of his hand and she grinds against it unashamedly, lifting her breasts from the water with each arch of her back. Kaidan’s shifted, his free hand hooked under one knee to spread her farther open. He keeps up the friction of his palm but angles a finger lower, sliding into her tight heat.

Locks and keys.

One finger becomes two and his hand is a wave of its own, urging the whimpers that fall from her lips as he moves up and down, in and out, gripping her tightly outside and in. She rocks her hips back against him and earns her own gasp, hardness pressed between them in the confines of the tub. Tugging at his hand, she flips in the water to nestle between his thighs.

“Want you.”

“Mmmm.” He watches her with hooded eyes, even as she brings his hand to her lips and swirls her tongue around his clever fingers. Bracing herself on the rim of the tub, she slides her way up his body, bracketing his hips with her thighs. There’s a moment when she’s poised above him, lips parted in anticipation, and his eyes meet hers with the barest crinkle at the edges.

And then he bites down on her nipple.

Hard.

She slams down onto him, the water slopping chaotically around them. It’s not slow and gentle waves they make now but a storm, churning up between them and over them and over the sides of the heavy old tub.

He fills her perfectly, just like she’d known he would even before he _did_ , and she can feel every inch of him as they slide together. The water changes things, makes the stretch a little rougher but once they get going they’re caught in their own currents, hips pulled back and forth by the waves even if they stop to catch a breath.

Not that they stop.

Hands dig into her hips and bring her to him every time she flows away, and she grabs his hair tightly just to hear the moan he makes beneath her. He’s close, his hips stuttering as he loses their steady rhythm and fucks up roughly into her.

“Fuck, Ben, _fuck_ -” The tendons in his neck stand out as he pumps into her a final time, words lost in a sharp whimper as his eyes stare wide at the ceiling, mouth slack. She’s so close and she doesn’t want to wait, wedging a hand between their bodies to stroke at her clit until she joins him, muscles fluttering against his softening length as he groans against her neck at the added sensation.

The water settles around them, waves smoothing to ripples. She leans her head against his chest and watches the hair there wave slowly in the calming sea, the taste of his sweat under her lips cut by the sweetness of the water and the feeling of his heart thudding against her cheek.

“Damage?”

Kaidan peeks over the rim of the tub.

“We’ll need some more towels,” he says. Then, smoothing a hand up her back, “and my fingers are all pruny.”


End file.
